In February 1793, Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe created the exclusively-female Société des républicaines révolutionnaires (Society of Revolutionary Republicans—the final e in républicaines explicitly denoting Republican Women), which boasted two hundred members. Viewed by the historian Daniel Guérin as a sort of "feminist section of the Enragés",[1] they participated in the fall of the Girondins. Lacombe advocated giving weapons to women. However, the Society was outlawed by the revolutionary government in the following year.

The Bourbon Restoration re-established the prohibition of divorce in 1816. When the July Monarchy restricted the political rights of the majority of the population, the feminist struggle rejoined the Republican and Socialist struggle for a "Democratic and Social Republic," leading to the 1848 Revolution and the proclamation of the Second Republic.

The 1848 Revolution became the occasion of a public expression of the feminist movement, who organized itself in various associations. Women's political activities led several of them to be proscribed as the other Forty-Eighters.

Famous figures such as Louise Michel, the "Red Virgin of Montmartre" who joined the National Guard and would later be sent to New Caledonia, symbolize the active participation of a small number of women in the insurrectionary events. A female battalion from the National Guard defended the Place Blanche during the repression.

Despite some cultural changes following World War I, which had resulted in women replacing the male workers who had gone to the front, they were known as the Années folles and their exuberance was restricted to a very small group of female elites. Victor Margueritte's La Garçonne (The Flapper, 1922), depicting an emancipated woman, was seen as scandalous and caused him to lose his Légion d'honneur. During the Third Republic, the suffragettes movement championed the right to vote for women, but did not insist on the access of women to legislative and executive offices.[4] The suffragettes, however, did honour the achievements of foreign women in power by bringing attention to legislation passed under their influence concerning alcohol (such as Prohibition in the United States), regulation of prostitution, and protection of children's rights.[4] Despite this campaign and the new role of women following World War I, the Third Republic declined to grant them voting rights, mainly because of fear of the influence of clericalism among them,[4] echoing the conservative vote of rural areas for Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte during the Second Republic.

A few women acceded to political responsibilities in the 1930s, although they kept a low profile. In 1936, the new Prime Minister, Léon Blum, included three women in the Popular Front government: Cécile Brunschvicg, Suzanne Lacore and Irène Joliot-Curie.[4] Although Blum's feminism has been subject to debate,[5] he had defended voting rights for women, a proposition included in the program of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) party since 1906. However, he did not implement this measure because of the opposition of the Radical-Socialist Party. The inclusion of women in the Popular Front government was unanimously appreciated: even the far-right candidate Xavier Vallat addressed his "congratulations" to Blum for this measure while the conservative newspaper Le Temps wrote, on 1 June 1936, that women could be ministers without previous authorizations from their husbands. Cécile Brunschvicg and Irène Joliot-Curie were both legally "under-age" as women. At the end of the 1930s, the right-wing did not oppose women's right to vote anymore, partially because the female vote could be turned to their advantage.[4]

The third woman to accede to governmental responsibilities would be the Radical-Socialist Jacqueline Thome-Patenôtre, nominated Under-State Secretary to Reconstruction and Lodging in Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury's cabinet in 1957. Nafissa Sid Cara then participated to the government as State Secretary in charge of Algeria from 1959 till the end of the war in 1962. Marie-Madeleine Dienesch, who evolved from Christian-Democracy to Gaullism (in 1966), occupied various offices as State Secretary between 1968 and 1974. Finally, Suzanne Ploux was State Secretary for the Minister of National Education in 1973 and 1974. In total, only seven women acceded to governmental offices between 1946 and 1974, and only one as minister.[4] Historians explain this rarity by underlining the specific context of the Trente Glorieuses (Thirty Glorious Years) and of the baby boom, leading to a strengthening of familialism and patriarchy.

Even left-wing cabinets abstained from nominating women: Pierre Mendès-France (advised by Colette Baudry) did not include any woman in his cabinet, neither did Guy Mollet, the secretary general of the SFIO, nor the centrist Antoine Pinay. Although the École nationale d'administration (ENA) elite administrative school (from which a lot of French politicians graduate) became gender-mixed in 1945, only 18 women graduated from it between 1946 and 1956 (compared to 706 men).[4]

Of the first eleven cabinets of the Fifth Republic, four did not count any women. In May 1968, the cabinet was exclusively male. This low representation of women was not, however, specific to France: West Germany's government did not include any women in any office from 1949 to 1961, and in 1974-1975, only 12 countries in the world had female ministers. The British government had exclusively male ministers.[4]

In 1971, the feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi founded the group Choisir ("To Choose"), to protect the women who had signed "Le Manifeste des 343 Salopes" (Manifesto of the 343 Bitches). This provocative title became popular after Cabu's drawing on a satirical journal with the caption: « Who got those 343 whores pregnant? ») admitting to have practiced illegal abortions, and therefore exposing themselves to judicial actions and prison sentences.[6] The Manifesto had been published in Le Nouvel Observateur on 5 April 1971. In 1972 Choisir transformed into a clearly reformist body, and the campaign greatly influenced the passing of the law allowing contraception and abortion carried through by Simone Veil in 1975. The Veil Act was at the time hotly contested by Veil's own party, the conservative Union for French Democracy (UDF).

This new, relative feminisation of power was partly explained by Giscard's government's fears of being confronted with another May 1968 and the influence of the MLF: "We can therefore explain the birth of state feminism under the pressure of contest feminism [féminisme de contestation]", wrote Christine Bard. Although the far-left remained indifferent to the feminisation of power, in 1974, Arlette Laguiller became the first woman to present herself at a presidential election (for the Trotskyist party Workers' Struggle, LO), and integrated feminist propositions in her party. Giscard's achievements concerning the inclusion of women in government has been qualified by Françoise Giroud as his most important feat, while others, such as Evelyne Surrot, Benoîte Groult or the minister Monique Pelletier, denounced electoral "alibis". The sociologist Mariette Sineau underlined that Giscard included women only in the low-levels of the governmental hierarchy (state secretaries) and kept them in socio-educative affairs. Seven women in eighteen (from 1936 to 1981) had offices related to youth and education, and four (including two ministers) had offices related to health, reflecting a traditional gender division. The important Ministry of Finances, Defence, Foreign Affairs and Interior remained out of reach for women. Only six women in eighteen had been elected through universal suffrage. The rest were nominated by the Prime Minister. Hélène Missoffe was the only deputy to be named by Giscard.[4]

The term 'French feminism' refers to a branch of feminist theories and philosophies that emerged in the 1970s to the 1990s. French feminist theory, compared to Anglophone feminisms, is distinguished by an approach which is more philosophical and literary. Its writings tend to be effusive and metaphorical being less concerned with political doctrine and generally focused on theories of "the body".[7] The term includes writers who are not French, but who have worked substantially in France and the French tradition[8] such as Julia Kristeva and Bracha Ettinger.

The French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote novels; monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues; essays, biographies, and an autobiography. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. It sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, she accepted Jean-Paul Sartre's precept that existence precedes essence; hence "one is not born a woman, but becomes one". Her analysis focuses on the social construction of Woman as the Other, this de Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression.[9] She argues that women have historically been considered deviant and abnormal, and contends that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. De Beauvoir argues that for feminism to move forward, this attitude must be set aside.[9]

A "third wave" of the feminist movement arose around 2000, combining the issues of sexism and racism, with an interest towards movements such as Black feminism in the United States. In January 2007, the collective of the Féministes indigènes launched a manifesto in honour of the Mulatress Solitude on the website of the Indigènes de la République (Indigenous People of the Republic). She was a heroine who fought with Louis Delgrès against the re-establishment of slavery, abolished during the French Revolution) by Napoleon.[18] The manifesto stated that "Western Feminism did not have the monopoly of resistance against masculine domination" and supported a mild form of separatism, refusing to allow others (males or whites) to speak in their names.[19]

Contemporary French feminism, compared to Anglophone feminism, is distinguished by an approach which is both more philosophical and more literary. Its texts are effusive, metaphorical, and conceptually rich, rather than pragmatic. They are not as concerned with immediate political doctrine or a "materialism" which is not of the body. Some writers most commonly associated with the "French feminist" label include Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, and Catherine Clement. Simone de Beauvoir is a clear forerunner of French feminism, as is Marguerite Duras. Common themes of this work include at least some degree of anti-essentialism, critical feminism, and a critique of phallogocentrism informed by contemporary developments in Continental philosophy.[citation needed][original research?]